Chapter Text
Chosen was sitting on the PC, bored as always, with the uncomfortable feeling of Alan clicking through his settings. He had burned another one of Alan’s essays on “accident” right when he was getting ready to submit it, and he could tell Alan was trying to find something that only let him destroy what he wanted.
Every little click through the options sent tiny electric shocks through him that didn’t do much but feel mildly uncomfortable. Chosen didn’t think there was going to be the option Alan was hoping for. He was mildly interested in what options there were, so while keeping his head stable, he glanced up at the options. He had long since learned that Alan couldn’t follow his gaze from his position on the other side of the screen.
He spotted a toggleable detail that Chosen was unfamiliar with. “Avian Traits,” was what the program had available, the current mode being “dormant.” None of these words were familiar with Chosen, and while Alan was clicking around, he didn’t really think his captor knew much of it either. The other options available were “active” and “locked.” He spotted Alan give a shrug after referencing his phone, meaning he had probably looked it up and found nothing. Alan moved his cursor to switch it to “locked,” which then opened another pop-up.
{Do you want this change to be permanent? (You can change this manually at any time) [YES] [NO]}
Alan clicked YES.
There wasn’t a noticeable physical difference, and Alan brought his cursor to poke at him a couple times. When no reaction was given, he gave up and kept clicking through Chosen’s settings, leaving the inactive box checked.
Though there weren’t any physical differences, Chosen felt a weird sense of absence. His head cleared a little, and he somehow felt more limited, like he had just noticed he had a limb only because it was gone. It didn’t feel like a big change though.
He wondered if he was supposed to feel stress from this. That Alan had just altered some of his code from where it was, and it changed something, even if he couldn't tell what it was. Chosen didn’t know what an avian was, and he didn’t really give a damn if it hadn’t been helping him get out of here in the first place. Maybe he would be more curious to explore it if he weren’t stuck either burning pop-ups or stuck in a small, dark box.
He never did get around to finding out.
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Chosen had been trying to take care of himself since the showdown. Key word trying.
Even though that kid had healed his wounds, their own, and revived their friends, Chosen had been in vague pain since the showdown from what might be an unrelated thing, and it had been growing by the day.
When he felt that green energy swirling around him, healing his wounds and sealing them like they had never been made, he did feel something shift in his code that he couldn’t put a name to. He had felt slightly foggy in the head for the past few days that had only gotten worse, and something of a compulsion to hide from everyone and everything.
That was nothing new, but it felt more internal, than driven by fear or anxiety like usual. Maybe it was just the sadness from losing Dark. He hadn’t felt much recently. He could barely eat, let alone cook food for himself. He didn’t want to go into the city, he didn’t think he could see anyone. He was used to living in hunger, Alan barely fed him during those four years, so he knew he would be fine without. He ought to try anyway.
He was out in the forest, scavenging for food that he didn’t even want to eat and took a gamble on eating half the time. Some berries were safe, others were a deadly poison. He never learned botany enough to be able to tell the difference, but they had tasted good enough a few days ago and he was still alive.
One week since the showdown, and Chosen was feeling so much pain. He left the house to go scavenging again, hoping that a walk might ease some of the pain on his back. He lied to himself that it would be good for him to smell the fresh air and the trees around him, and see the sunset and stars.
Except, that walk was doing neither of the things he pretended he believed it would do. He didn’t feel any more at ease, even with the fresh air, and his back was getting worse with every step he took. It should have been worrying. Chosen took pain well, he usually didn’t react too badly to it and was more than used to withstanding it for a long period of time. But whatever this was had him stopping every several meters and leaning against a tree to catch his breath while trying to shift to a position that wasn’t as painful.
After just a short walk, he decided he better go back to the house. Maybe dip into the supply of expired pain medication he told Dark they should have six years ago. Dark was right that they would probably never need it. Except now Chosen felt like he needed it. By the time he made it back home, still pausing frequently, the moon was in the sky and Chosen couldn’t even look up at the stars to admire them because he just knew he needed to get somewhere safer.
Chosen collapsed onto the old couch he had picked up off the side of the road as soon as he got back to the house and that was when things went from bad to worse.
Chosen had known years of pain and punishment. Times of torment and the days of being an ad blocker and a means of entertainment. His ankle never really stopped hurting him, as well as he hid it.
Chosen had never known a pain like this.
He screamed. Chosen never screamed when he was in pain. He gave up on it after he eventually figured out that Alan couldn’t hear him, and there was no point to screaming. This was different. He didn’t think there was another way out there to feel pain. He was wrong.
He couldn’t feel anything else. He must have fallen off the couch at some point, because he banged his head against the ground while trying to find any position that alleviated what was going on. His vision was gone somehow, and he didn’t know whether it was blurry from tears or because he just couldn’t see anymore.
And it just kept going. Chosen thought he might pass out. He smelled blood. He felt ice at his fingertips and burned fabric against his face. His healing factor wasn’t kicking in and he didn’t even know where to focus it to try and activate it manually, not that he had ever been good at controlling that one.
A bad wave that made it feel like his back was being shredded coursed through him and he gasped and banged a fist against the ground. He would find cracks in the cold concrete later.
“Help, Dark, help!” He screamed, not really thinking about his words. But nobody came.
There was no one to hear him scream, and perhaps that was the worst thing about all of this. Dark was complicated. Dark was such a point of stress and tension for him and she had been for years. But she was his best friend. And she was gone. A good person would think that was a good thing, right? After everything that had happened, after all the destruction she had advocated for and the stealing and the simple fact that she had planned to destroy the world, a good person would think the world was better off.
And yet Chosen wanted her there so badly. For all the bad times, there were good ones too. He remembered how they would sit on the edge of the world, Chosen admiring it and her talking about how it would belong to them. He remembered her eagerly showing off her thin, shelled beetle wings she had found dormant in her own code when she had looked through it and the way she would click when she was concentrated. Good times that would never be again because now she was gone. And that was supposed to be a good thing. It probably said something that he was thinking about her while he was in pain.
He didn’t care if she would have done something to help or seen him in a weak spot and taken the opportunity to put a sword through his back, either way it would mean an end to this.
He didn’t know how much time passed. The power had been off in the house for weeks now, and he hadn’t been paying attention to where the moon was in the sky when this all started. All he knew was that eventually, after he might have passed out, was that the pain actually started to ease up to something more manageable.
He started breathing, tears and spit dripping from his face as he heavily pushed himself off the floor and wiped his mouth. As normal sensation outside of pain started to creep back in, the first thing he noticed was a new weight on his back. He turned to see two blood-soaked limbs hanging off of him, pushing his old shirt up his back.
What was there to think? What was this? What was this even supposed to mean? Who cared?
Moonlight glistened against the blood pooled on the floor and Chosen couldn’t care much to even think about cleaning it.
He lay back down on the floor, feeling the blood soak into his wrinkled up shirt and the scent of iron hit his nose. He was panting. The cold concrete felt good against his face.
Wings. Feathered ones. Chosen recognized as he felt them fluttering and twitching every so often, sending uncomfortable shocks into his back. He felt blood continue to drip down his back. The wound wasn’t closed. His heartbeat slowed eventually and he finally found it in himself to push himself up and stay up.
He guessed he might as well try to clean up his back. If the night’s events suggested anything, it was that this was what was probably causing him pain for the past week, and they had probably just burst through his back. So if that had happened, there were probably exit wounds he needed to clean.
He kept a hand on the furniture or wall as he staggered to the bathroom and fumbled for the light switch that did nothing because the energy was cut off. Grumbling, he reached up and pulsed just a little bit of electricity into the wall from a tampered lightning bolt to get it up and running. The lights flickered on and he got a better look at himself. He slowly pulled the shirt off the rest of the way so it wasn’t blocking or touching anything.
He was covered in blood, first of all, and upon turning around he could see that his back was badly torn up. That had to be why they still hurt. The skin around his shoulder blades where the wings had emerged was ripped open to reveal a nasty looking wound that was weeping blood. He couldn't get his healing factor to work, so he sighed and grabbed a large roll of medical tape and bandages and painfully twisted around to press the bandages around the base of the wings. He could feel the skin rip just a little more at the twist, but he knew he was just going to need to power through this anyway.
He didn’t know how long it took him to reach around to eventually apply enough bandages and secure it with enough medical tape that it worked, but eventually he stopped dripping blood on the bathroom floor, so that was probably good enough.
He felt slightly faint, probably from the blood loss, and he hadn’t even tried getting the blood out of his clothes or the wings that had just ripped out of him after a painful few days. He didn’t care much for the shirt, and it would probably be easier to get out of the wings once it was dried. He should eat something. Meat probably, something about the iron. All he could think to do was sleep.
And he did sleep. He trudged to his bed, which hadn’t been made in probably too long, and sunk into the stained spring mattress. He was out before his head hit the pillow.
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Chosen was flying for his life. Not with the wings, never with those things. After trying to take off a few times with them and them just failing to keep him up, he just decided to go back to using the fire propulsion. The best he could do was just keep them from flailing around and messing up his flight. They did make him slightly slower because of the weight, but he had been on the run long enough that it didn’t matter much.
His movement was fine, it did everything he needed it to, so he would just keep ignoring the things.
The past few years had been rough. He thought Dark’s death would eventually wear off and it would become a more distant, but painful memory. Nope. Still hurt. He didn’t think getting those ugly black wings helped much. He had considered looking up “sticks with wings” on a local library’s computer, but he couldn’t manage to find his way through the city long enough to even find a library, let alone stay at one long enough to learn anything because every time he was in one place for too long he just got chased again.
He had spotted a few sticks with wings during his chases, but never had the time to observe or talk to them. And he hated talking to strangers. He could make theories and inferences. Plucking them was probably bad for them. He had started when trying to get rid of a deeply uncomfortable feeling around one and ended up pulling it out. There was something so satisfying about seeing the end of the feathers in his fingers as he rolled the feather around in his hand. He liked to feel the barbs flatten against his fingers when he pressed down hard enough. It was a pattern, almost a force of habit. He would get the itch, reach back and find a feather that was just loose enough and pull it. The skin never resisted too much, and then he had a new feather to play with in his hands until he lost interest and wanted to see another one. It never hurt too bad. Just a quick prick that he barely felt if he got it out at the right angle and he had a fidget that occupied him for the next 45 seconds.
He always felt insane after sitting in the bathroom, for what turned out to be longer than he wanted to, just plucking feathers, messing with them, and then setting them aside to find a new one. He would look in the mirror and feel the smoothness of the skin where he had plucked the feathers from just asking what is wrong with me? It was just the only thing about them that felt even remotely good since getting them. Everything else felt wrong.
He hadn’t felt right since getting the stupid things. They didn’t even work. They seemed to hurt all the time in one way or another, and one of them seemed to not even have feeling in it. That one hung off him differently than the other one, which probably had something to do with it, but he didn’t know how to fix it. It had been that way since the beginning. His head felt wrong, he didn’t feel like he had been normal in years. Perhaps he had never been normal, but he felt further away from it than he did before he got them. Or maybe it was just that Dark was still gone. He had heard grief could do funny things to a person.
He couldn’t shake the mercenaries, and he was starting to get desperate.
He had been on the run for years, and he must be getting worse because this had never gone on so long before. He could usually hide somewhere and get away within the first few maneuvers he tried. At this rate, they were going to catch him and do who knows what to him. He didn’t know. He had made a few theories in the middle of the night, looking out the window in his room, unable to sleep. Maybe they wanted his powers. Sticks with powers were more rare, but generally accepted from his understanding, but he could tell that few actually came close to his or Dark’s skill level. They might want him as a power source. Or maybe there was some human that wanted a pop-up blocker. Alan didn’t seem to want or need one anymore, but that didn’t mean his former role hadn’t spread by word of mouth.
But if he was being honest, it was almost certainly his role in the destruction of source sites. And whoever wanted him probably wanted him to answer for his crimes, which could mean anything.
As selfish as it was, Chosen didn’t want to suffer. He knew he would if he was caught, based on how fiercely these mercenaries were after him. How could he be expected to stop running and give himself over to someone who wanted to hurt him? Even if he did deserve it for whatever it was they were exactly unhappy about, did that mean he should give himself over willingly?
He had considered the option before. Perhaps the person behind this would respect the integrity and let him go, or perhaps give him a lighter sentence of something. But Chosen was always something of a coward, wasn’t he?
He nearly walked himself to a police station once. He told himself over and over that he just needed to start walking. But he just stood at his doorstep, paralyzed by visions of what would happen to him next and all the ways he would be hurt and he couldn’t do it and retreated back into the house to pull out another patch of feathers.
It might not matter if he didn’t figure out how to shake these mercenaries, and his idea to turn himself in would probably become one he regretted not trying if he wasn’t careful. He flew to the cliffs, where the lab had been.
Where the kid had killed Dark. They had jumped in front of him back then, when Dark was menacingly advancing with a maniacal expression Chosen only saw on her face when she was struggling to resist her mission statement mixed with fury that meant she wasn’t trying as hard as she usually did to resist it. They had been able to help back then. Maybe they could help now.
It was a risky plan. He would need to get up to Alan’s PC, which was its own challenge without trying to do it without being seen. And it relied on the kid even being willing to help because there was not a chance Chosen was going to stay on the PC of his own will.
He was surrounded. He tried breathing fire at them, a warning to stay back, stay away, don’t touch me. If he wanted to kill them he could. He knew he could. But that would just make that worse and this was the best he could do. Even his mangled wings spread out in a pathetic display of intimidation, as they did sometimes.
Those awful awful things just had to display every emotion he had for everyone who was around him at the time. If he was afraid, they would either shrink behind his back or flare out to make himself look like more of a threat.
Sometimes when he was sad they would wrap themselves around him and maybe that was what he hated about them the most. They weren’t comforting, they were just a reminder of everything he never got the opportunity to have. Love, warmth, acceptance, peace, kindness, everything he only saw from afar on rare occasions he was even able to see other sticks without running from them. How pathetic was he if his own limbs were trying to substitute for that?
And of course they only served to make his situation worse because he watched the moment the mercenary with the sunglasses registered that he was a larger target and perfectly aimed one of those glitches directly at an outstretched wing and fired.
It burned and shocked like electricity and it was too intense to push through at first contact. He lost his flow immediately and dropped into the cold water below. He had never been a strong swimmer and he hated the feeling of the wings that caused this problem being soaked. Not to mention that they just served to drag him down into the water. How was he supposed to swim with two more limbs that were built for the sky, and not water? The glitching and the water caused some more of his feathers to fall out and they drifted through the water as he flailed and launched himself out of the water with his powers and up to the PC.
One well-executed plan later and after tanking several more of those glitch shots, Chosen made it into the tunnel to Alan’s PC.
Of all places to go for safety, this wasn’t it. He didn’t feel good. If there was a way to feel nausea in his brain, that was it. He was dizzy, disoriented, and in pain. That chase had taken everything out of him. If the kid didn’t want to help…Chosen didn’t know what he was going to do. He couldn’t shake the mercenaries, he was too tired. He wouldn’t stay on the PC, it wasn’t safe. And it was too late to turn himself in.
Everything hurt. So. Bad.
Chosen stumbled onto the PC, glitching painfully and struggling to think straight.
He saw Second. He saw their wings. Pretty, well-kept orange and green ones that moved easily. They looked like they didn’t creak and groan with strained muscles and frayed feathers. They didn’t have any bald or thin patches from yanking out their own feathers. And their colors were pretty, the barbs all lay exactly as they were supposed to. They had feathers on their ears, which they hadn’t seen on other sticks, nor himself. Probably something to do with how strong they were, and they saw them twitch slightly in response to sound. He saw their wings rise and flare out slightly, though not in an offensive way that Chosen’s had just done. He saw their feathers fluff a little. It was almost hypnotic.
He didn’t really recognize they hadn’t had those things last he had seen them, or their surprise that he was here, or the apprehension from everyone else on the PC. He barely even noticed Alan sitting on the other side of the screen, also looking worried.
His ears were ringing. His mind felt on the brink of snapping into something unrecognizable, he was in pain as more glitches shook through him. He couldn’t think, couldn’t focus, couldn’t take a moment to breathe and think that maybe his next actions weren’t going to be the best idea. But it was the only one he had.
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As that round of play-fighting concluded, Second lay breathless on the artboard, smiling, but tired from the spar. As good as they all were at fighting, Alan had a stupid good reaction time.
Absolutely nobody could have predicted Chosen bursting through the portal like death was chasing him. He looked like death a little.
Second gasped seeing him. Chosen didn’t have wings last time they saw him.
He did now and they looked bad. Worse than how Purple’s had looked by a long shot. Chosen didn’t need wings to fly, and good thing too, because those things probably wouldn’t even let him glide. They were soaking wet and were probably missing over half of the feathers, some of them primaries. Second couldn’t even tell if the feathers were supposed to be black, and the way they hung off him, the right one looked like it might not be sitting in the joint right which had to be mighty painful.
He rushed over to them and they jumped back. They had never seen such a frenzied look on someone’s face before.
“Help me, please,” he begged. “You have to. You’re the only one who can. I don’t know what else to do.”
He wasn’t making any sense. Rambling about lasers, powers stronger than his own, like Second could do any of that. He was making small, insane laughs between his words. It scared them. Usually this was something they could handle, they had calmed down their friends, and been calmed down by them as well. They had been able to get through to Purple and had come to understand what helped in moments of stress and chaos the most in accordance to their avian traits. But this felt so far out of their depth and Chosen seemed so erratic that they didn’t know what to do as he was telling them “just do it! You did it before! Like this!”
Second’s ear feathers were pinned back and they tried to shield their eyes from the lasers coming out of Chosen’s.
Blue walked over and carefully took Second out of Chosen’s grasp.
“Chosen,” she said in her soothing voice. “You need to calm down,” she turned to Second. “You okay, Chick?”
Second saw him breath haggardly, and he might have been starting to panic. He clearly wasn’t calming down.
“...Chosen?” They carefully called his name and suddenly he shook his head and lunged for them, grabbing them with so much speed and carrying them through the portal.
This was bad. This was very very bad.
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The Box hurt. Actually, it was Victim that hurt more.
This grey hollow head that could have only been drawn by Alan with somewhat well-kept wings of a pigeon seemed to come out of nowhere. By Chosen’s standards, they looked great, but Second’s had looked the best among the three of them. He had seemed to unload the rage of a lifetime upon him. It was exactly what he was afraid of when he considered turning himself in.
Chosen had done his best to keep up, fought with everything he had. And he really had tried. He was proud of that combination of tricking Victim to pull on the rope so it was taught enough to cut, and then a follow up with backwards fire. He thought it might be one of his more clever moments. It just wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
So here he was, stuck in this stupid chair while Victim screamed in his face, asking where Alan was or something. Chosen didn’t really want to cooperate with him after getting thrown around the box.
At some point while Victim was interrogating him, he grabbed a fist full of ragged and brittle feathers and pulled. The feathers dislodged easier than they probably should have, and blood started running out of some of the follicles where they had come out. Chosen painfully sucked in a breath. It hurt when they were pulled like that. When someone else did it, and when he got so many in one go, and when he got ones that didn’t want to come out as easily as the others. His wings pretty much always hurt, but they were still more sensitive to pain than everywhere else. They had kind of gotten him here in the first place, it was only natural that they should cause him more pain. Even Victim took pause, probably because of how easily they had come out. He wondered if Victim had actually meant to do that. It occurred to him that no one had ever touched them before that moment.
The moment passed though, and Chosen was hooked up to some VR device that scanned his memories. Victim didn’t touch his wings again. Chosen almost wished he would just cut them off and be done with them.
But he did make him re-live Dark’s death. He didn’t want to see that again. He either got paused again, or he just blacked out mentally. He wouldn’t be completely surprised if he had started getting memory lapses, it was probably the next progression in his hellscape of a mind, and he had actually wondered if he would start losing his memory or start hallucinating first.
Whatever the matter was, he came back to right back at that stupid cliff over that terrible bay staring down Victim who was significantly more blue than last time he had seen him. He gave him a self-satisfactory smile and snapped, and Chosen started falling.
That was fine. He could just activate his powers…except he couldn’t. He just kept falling, and it wasn’t like his wings would do anything but make it worse. Where did his powers go? What happened? What had Victim done to him while he was out?
He hit the water, and this time he really did think he was going to die.
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Somehow, he didn’t die.
It was over, the best Chosen could tell. He could barely believe he wasn’t dead, but he almost felt like he was in a much more metaphorical sense.
The kids had led him to Minecraft after he couldn't calm down on the PC and had him sit down on a wool couch they had put together near some trees Chosen didn’t recognize from his first visit in Minecraft. They had walked a short distance away, probably to discuss what to do with him.
Maybe it wasn’t over. Maybe they were discussing how to best take their own revenge for kidnapping their friend. Second seemed a little shaken from everything, and this little group seemed rather protective of their own. He shouldn’t run. He had learned that by now.
He was vaguely zoned out and was picking at the grass. He wanted to pick at his wings, but that would make him look insane in front of another stick with wings. It might be rude, and Chosen couldn’t afford to offend them right now. But he wanted to pick at them so badly. There was this one feather that looked isolated and he could tell it would come out easily. Maybe just the one. It wouldn’t make a difference, his wings wouldn’t look any different from the loss of a single feather that was driving Chosen crazy just by existing.
He stole a look over to the kids, who were still talking with each other in hushed voices that Chosen couldn’t see. They weren’t looking at him. He could pluck just one. Just one little feather and he would feel much better. He reached to the side and bright his wing forward to pull it.
Just like he expected, the feather came out easily. Too easily actually. That evil little itch wasn’t satisfied, so maybe just another one would do it, since that one wasn’t enough.
“What are you doing?” A voice snapped him out of his state and he realized that there was a small pile of ugly black feathers in front of him. He looked up and saw one of the kids, Red, about 20 feet off looking at him with a strange expression on his face.
“Nothing!” Chosen said quickly in something of a panic and he dropped the feather he had been messing with to the ground. That itch yelled at him that he wasn’t done with messing with it and that he needed to get another one to finish that weird ritual of poking the end of the feather and feeling the odd textures in the feather that had developed in all of them for some reason.
Idiot. Stupid idiot, that’s probably offensive to winged sticks and now they’re going to be even more angry at you. You can’t just sit it out? Pathetic, weak thing, you knew that was dangerous.
Red approached him slowly, like he was a feral animal. Chosen couldn’t blame him for it really. He had kidnapped his friend in a frenzy. He probably thought he was unstable and might do the same thing again because what kind of person started pulling out their own feathers?
“Mind if I sit next to you?” Red asked in a calm and strangely soothing voice.
Chosen just nodded slowly with permission and kept his eyes trained on the red stick as he sat next to him, giving him a good amount of space. He didn’t seem hostile, but Chosen couldn’t be too careful. Red placed his hand at a middle point between the two of them, but didn’t move any closer. He moved predictably and with a smoothness Chosen hadn’t remembered from the last time he had seen him, though they hadn’t interacted much.
“How are you doing?” Red asked.
Chosen shrugged. Everything still hurt. Just because he wasn’t in immediate danger anymore didn’t mean that stopped. He didn’t want to ask Second to use their healing ability on him either, he had put the younger one through enough already. Asking for them to use their powers would probably just tell them that he hadn’t learned anything from this. So he would just wait it out like usual. Hopefully, this stuff actually healed right.
“Do they hurt?”
“Do what hurt?”
Red pointed with his other hand at Chosen’s ugly wings and at the small pile of feathers on the ground.
“Your wings. Are they itching? I can get you an itch cream if that’ll make it feel better.” His voice still had that extremely soothing tone that somehow seemed to get past…something, Chosen didn’t know what. He shook his head in a tiny motion to try and clear the effect. He didn’t expect that, Red offering something to help.
Was this a trick? The kids didn’t seem like the type to lay this kind of trap, but it didn’t seem quite right. What reason did they have to be helping him? After everything. Maybe this was a test. To see if he would try to get their help again after barging into their lives and demanding it before ruining their lives.
He slowly shook his head.
“I don’t need an itch cream,” he said as politely as he could. He noticed that Red’s hand had inched closer. He didn’t say anything, he just stayed still.
When he didn’t move away, he saw Red’s hand very slowly rise more toward him and Chosen shut his eyes, willing himself to remain as still as possible.
Be still and take it. Just sit and take it, and when they can tell you’ve learned your lesson, they’ll leave you alone. It’ll be easier.
Chosen felt a hand very tentatively brush against one of his feathers and he froze. His eyes snapped open and onto where Red had made contact with his wing. It was warm in a pleasant way. I’m a way that seemed to seep into his skin, even if it was overwhelming. He wasn’t expecting a gentle touch. Despite that, he felt every muscle in his body tense up. His eyes fixed on Red’s hand, which had moved back when Chosen had reacted.
“What are you doing?” Chosen asked, voice tight.
“They look uncomfortable,” Red said. “Can I help with them?”
Chosen didn’t know about this. Nobody had ever really touched his wings before, aside from Victim, and he didn’t really count that. He didn’t know what Red meant by helping him either. He probably shouldn’t deny them of any requests, but if this was another test to see if he was going to try to go to them for help again then that could be the wrong answer as well. He wasn’t answering. He was staying quiet for too long, but Red had gone ahead and placed his hand back to the middle point it was at earlier.
Chosen despised that he mourned the loss of the touch just a little bit. He had to make a choice, and against his better judgement, he decided that he should just let Red to do whatever he wanted, and if that included touching his wings, that was better than being hurt.
“Do you know what’s wrong with them?” Chosen asked Red. He didn’t know why he was asking, but if he was going to go this direction he might as well try to get some answers for what was wrong with him. Why didn’t his feathers look as pretty as Second’s did?
“Do you?” Red asked back gently, facing his body more toward Chosen's.
“No,” he said bluntly, voice devoid of emotion.
“Would you like me to tell you?”
Chosen shrugged and gave a small ‘go ahead’ gesture. He guessed that with how nice Second’s wings looked all the time, the kids probably did actually know more about what was so wrong with his.
“I got some help from Blue on this, she’s like our expert on this stuff in a more medical way. She said one of your wings looks like it’s out of place and she wants to get that fixed. The other thing that it seems like is going on is that you’re stress molting, which is causing your feathers to become brittle and fall out. And it doesn’t look like you’re preening at all, which they need to be even if you are molting.”
No, that wasn’t right. Well, Chosen wouldn’t know if the wing was out of place, and sometimes the feathers did fall out on their own, but Chosen did a lot to help them along. Most barren spots were just because Chosen apparently lacked all sense of self-control.
“They’ve always been like this,” Chosen said. “They just fall out easy, I help them along.”
“I saw you plucking them earlier. I thought you might be molting. Can you tell me why you’re doing that?”
Chosen sighed. He didn’t like this. He didn’t know if he was going to be reprimanded or something for this, but he was in it now. And something about this conversation had him just keep going. Usually he would give simpler answers, but for some reason he was willing to actually describe things.
“Feels good,” he said quietly. “Nothing else about them feels good, but when I pull one out, I feel better for a minute. They fall out easy. It doesn’t hurt.”
“You said nothing feels good?” Red asked. Chosen couldn’t read his tone and he was still talking in that voice that made his head go all fuzzy. Maybe that was why he was talking about this with Red.
“I feel wrong. It feels wrong, like everything I do with them isn’t working right. They’re uncomfortable in every position and my head hasn’t been right in years.” Chosen swallowed. “I haven't felt like myself since I got them. It’s easier to give in.”
“Chosen…do you know anything about avians at all?”
Chosen shook his head slowly. He had never really heard the term except for when Dark had excitedly shown off her bug wings and told him she wasn’t an avian, but something else. That was about it. So he just knew that Dark wasn’t one. It was probably just the actual term for winged sticks.
Although…there was that one time when Alan had turned it off. Perhaps that was back. Maybe that healing thing Second had done all those years ago reversed what Alan had done. But their powers seemed more geared toward helping than hurting, and these things had caused him nothing but hurt.
“Okay, how long have you had your wings?”
Chosen thought back. If it was 2023 now…
“Five years?”
A flash of horror shot across Red’s face, which was then neutralized quickly. Chosen didn’t notice.
“Okay, that’s…okay. So there’s a lot more to it than just wings and—” Red cut off. Chosen looked rather disinterested. Whatever information Red gave him now, he wasn’t going to hear, much less remember it. “We can talk about it later.”
“Okay.”
Chosen was not an easy person to help. That’s why Red had been sent. Every single one of them could tell that Chosen was reeling from everything, and they needed to deliberate on what to do for him. Second, while usually happy to take initiative, confessed they still felt uneasy from how he had acted when he first burst into the PC. They described it as somewhat animalistic. And that was Red’s specialty. Both Second and Purple said he had a way of getting past the rational brain and talking to the avian one. So that’s what he was going to do his best with.
“Can I show you how it’s supposed to feel?”
Chosen looked scared and sucked in a breath, but didn’t move away. Red gave him an encouraging smile.
“It’s supposed to feel nice,” Red reassured.
Chosen looked suspicious of him, but very slowly nodded his head while seeming to force his wings to extend so Red could reach. Reading his body language, Red got the feeling that Chosen didn’t actually know anything about what he was getting into, and was rather afraid of it as well. He was going to need to play this by ear. Initially, he was going to try and get an assessment for Blue so she could figure out what Chosen needed medically, but as he sat down, he very quickly recognized that Chosen wasn’t in tune with his avian side at all.
Thinking about it, Red hadn’t heard him chirp once, even though his body was noticeably holding a lot of tension that would be released well if he made those vocalizations. And when Red had started to approach him and saw him pulling out his own feathers he was even more worried.
The best way to get an avian more in tune with their instincts was usually through taking care of their wings, that felt like a common thread from everything Red knew. But preening was a very emotional thing. He didn’t want to push that on to Chosen in this state. The problem was, as Red tried to read Chosen more and more, the more he recognized that it might help Chosen more than anything else.
Now, whether this was going to be a standard preening or turn into something that had Red actually playing with Chosen’s wings so he could get some sense of comfort from them was going to depend on what happened next.
Red put his hand back on Chosen’s mangled wing. He didn’t move it, just keeping it there so Chosen could get used to the sensation. Chosen was rigid. The touch didn’t seem to relax him in the slightest and he was avoiding Red’s eyes, just staring off into the distance with enough tension that Red was waiting for him to stand up and leave in a moment.
The feathers didn’t look good. Red didn’t know how he might fix them, but he could probably do something with the thicker patches Chosen couldn’t reach. Those had more feathers, so those were the areas Red was going to focus on before going to the more sparse areas. He could maybe message the areas there weren’t any feathers as well.
But Red also theorized that Chosen hadn’t had much touch on his wings before, so he needed to get used to it first. Red moved his hand in a downward motion slowly, tracing one of the primaries to the tip before returning to his original position.
He felt a moment of triumph when Chosen relaxed ever so slightly. He repeated the motion, tracing another primary this time instead to add just a tiny bit of variation without overwhelming Chosen, which circled back around to what Red observed about his birdsong being absent.
Red didn’t trust Chosen to voice any discomfort right now. He was showing behavior similar to when Red’s rabbits were feeling stressed during desensitization training, and they would just cozy up to him. Fawning, the behavior was called. It wasn’t coming from a sense of trust, it was coming from a stress response that could border on panic. Red needed to know what Chosen was actually feeling outside of the fawn response, and that could come from birdsong.
It was of the best things about birdsong was that it was pure communication and emotion. If Chosen would chirp, Red would have a way to know if he needed to adjust.
“Do you know how to chirp?” Red asked.
“Am I supposed to?” Chosen asked, voice tired.
“It’s good for you. It’s a way to relieve stress and communicate without having to think about it too hard.”
Chosen shook his head and Red did his absolute best to hide his disappointment and concern. Second had started chirping almost immediately after they got their traits, and Purple actively struggled to suppress her chirps. So Chosen’s avian development was almost certainly severely stunted. It saddened him as well. Birdsong was highly communicative, even if it could be self-soothing, and Red was forming a small theory that Chosen might not have started chirping because there was nobody around to chirp at.
Chosen was hard enough to read, and Red didn’t know him that well. If they were going to progress, Red really needed him to have access to that for both of their sakes.
“Never done that.”
“You should learn,” Red said. “Give it a try for me?”
Chosen narrowed his eyes a little and hesitantly put his lips together to whistle, but what came out was definitely not a chirp. It didn’t come from the right vocal box. It was just an airy whistle that didn’t mean anything.
New goal. Chosen needed to learn how to chirp. When Purple had been getting more intune with her traits again, her birdsong had been a godsend, telling the gang when she was needing something specific. So much of it were things Purple couldn’t put words to, and with how bad Chosen was with describing things in avian terms, his birdsong coming in would really help with his progress.
“I’d like to try something,” Red said. “I’m going to mess with your wings a little. Not much, it should feel nice, and I want you to keep your mouth open and breathe out from the back of your throat.”
Red was picking words that circulated around giving direction and orders. If Chosen was fawning right now, he probably would just do what Red asked of him with little resistance, and as much as Red didn’t want him to feel the need to appease him out of a sense of fear, it was meant to help in the long run.
Chosen looked worried. He didn’t really trust this, and Red guessed that being so vague about it wasn’t helping, but he was concerned that giving Chosen the heads up might not be enough to do the trick. But he shakily opened his mouth and started breathing shallowly through it, just as Red had told him to. Red instructed him to take slightly deeper breaths and reached back to message a spot near the base of Chosen’s wing.
It was an unreachable spot for Chosen, and would therefore be more sensitive to touch than the rest of the wing. It had more feathers because of that, and both Second and Purple reacted well to that spot being played with, so they felt okay about the assumption.
Timing it with an exhale from Chosen, Red messaged the area and much to his delight, a surprised but slightly messy chirp made its way out of Chosen’s throat. It wasn’t necessarily a negative one but as soon as he heard it, Red backed off. It was a rather complicated one that sounded like fear and discomfort and Red didn’t want to push it. He was just happy that he had succeeded in getting a chirp out of Chosen. Red felt a bit of triumph from it. He hadn’t even needed to start preening to figure that out and he was pleased with just how far he had come with reading avian body language.
Chosen was reacting much more anxiously, and it wasn’t helped by the nervous twitter that escaped him. Red was already seeing the signs of a feedback loop from Chosen. Red fully removed his hands from Chosen’s wings.
He couldn’t actually stop Chosen from reacting however he would react to a brand new form of communication coming out of him, but he could shift his own actions based on how Chosen responded.
Chosen’s hands flew up to his throat as more sounds tumbled out of him, all of them since the first expressing stress. Red knew them all, some from experience, some from research, some from simple combinations of existing sounds Red knew, and some from having Second make them preemptively on command so they could be recognized in the future.
Stressed, hurt, hurt, be nice to me, don’t hurt me, ouch, what’s going on, hurt, confused, scared, I don’t understand.
Red gave an imitation whistle meaning, calm, safe, no danger. Chosen closed his eyes and shook his head as if trying to clear the effect Red’s own whistle made on him.
“You’re doing well,” Red switched back to words. Hearing birdsong might stress him out more right now. “It’s normal to use a lot of birdsong at first. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Are you lying? That was a chirp Red hadn’t expected to hear. He had never heard it before, but he knew the question intonation and the sound of an accusation of lying and could fit it together well enough.
“No,” Red said firmly. “I’m not lying to you. This is good.”
Stressed, weird, wrong. Not stopping. Why? Chosen was still gripping his throat with his other hand running through his hair and gripping it, and if Red had to guess, he was avoiding doing the same to his feathers.
“That’s okay. Let it pass, it’ll ease up,” Red reassured. The more he reacted to Chosen’s stress, the more he would elevate it. Stay calm, stay supportive. He didn’t touch him, he didn’t think that would help. Eventually, Chosen would regulate himself and they could continue however was constructive. “It’s your first time at it, and you’re just catching up, your voice will come back, just let it do what it needs. I’m not seeing anything out of the ordinary.”
To say there was nothing out of the ordinary was somewhat untrue. It wasn’t normal for an avian of 5 years to be developing their birdsong so late, and by instruction rather than naturally. It wasn’t ordinary for avians to pull out their own feathers. It wasn’t ordinary for them to be consistently stress-molting. But selective mutism spells were ordinary. So in a context of an overwhelmed and stressed avian, this was normal.
In all honesty, it went on longer than Red was expecting. And he had expected it to go on for a long time, given how long Chosen had gone without any birdsong. They sounded like the sounds of a raven, and from the fluffiness of some of Chosen’s feathers mixed with their black coloration, Red was pretty sure that’s what they were supposed to be. They would probably look magnificent in a better shape. Red listened to what he was saying, offering calm reassurances to him, but giving him space. Chosen let out some fear calls when Red inched closer, and even one that was a quick threat so he kept his distance. Chosen had immediately started apologizing for the threat in birdsong and Red had to calmly reassure him that it was okay and that he would just keep his distance until Chosen was okay.
Chosen clearly didn’t believe him. That was fine. Red knew he wasn’t going to do anything to him, and eventually Chosen would figure that out. This was rapport building.
Eventually the chirps slowed, but his voice wasn’t quite back. Red watched Chosen breathe in to start talking, but would stop quickly when all that came out was another chirp.
“Just say it in birdsong,” Red encouraged. “I’ll know what it means.”
Chosen shook his head. Too much.
“It’s too much?”
Chosen nodded.
“What’s too much?”
Chosen waved his arms around, motioning for what Red could only assume meant ‘everything’ or ‘all of it.’
“Okay,” Red nodded to show he understood. “Do you think you can do anything else, or do you want to stop here for the day?”
Chosen held up a hand in a clear stop motion and pointed down, mouthing the words ‘stop’ and ‘today.’ Red wasn’t surprised in the slightest. After this, he didn’t know how much Chosen would be able to withstand a preen of any kind. He was already clearly overwhelmed, and Red already felt like he was pushing right up against his boundaries. This was what Red was good at though. He would need to build up trust with Chosen, and while this was a good start, he needed to give Chosen the space to breathe and process what had just happened, and let his mind recognize Red as trustworthy over a period of time.
“Yeah, that’s okay,” Red said. “The guys went to set you up with a starter base, they sent me the coordinates, do you think you’re good to go over there?”
“I—” Chosen’s voice cracked, and he swallowed, fighting his way back to words. “I don’t understand.”
“Can you tell me what you don’t understand?”
“Don’t pretend you’re all not mad about what I did,” Chosen said, his voice dull now that he had it back. He was fidgeting with another feather that had actually fallen out, rather than one that had been plucked. “Aren’t you going to tell me to keep away from now on? That this was a final goodbye or favor, and now I can repay you by leaving you alone? What is this?”
“We’re shaken up a little,” Red said. “That was a lot and we weren’t prepared for it, and we’re probably going to take some time off from adventures to settle back down.” He wanted to be honest with Chosen, telling him that everything was just fine wasn’t going to be believed anyway. “But you’re also shaken up, and you should have the same opportunity to settle down too. We’re not going to fault you for trying to come to us for help, you said you didn’t have anywhere else to go. And you came to us for help, so that’s what we’re doing now that we know how to do that.”
“...okay.”
Yeah, that’s probably as much as Red was going to get from him.
“Are you good to go to the starter house?”
Chosen nodded. Still fawning, but at least he had his birdsong, and Red could work with what he had learned so far. He led the way, talking about other things during the walk.
Red told Chosen about the gang’s stories in Minecraft, about the Nether battle, about Purple, and the things they had found and seen while exploring. He talked about his animals, and even his experience with Herobrine, complicated as that was. He talked about his friends and what they all liked to do, and stories. He laughed about the time he tried to hit Green with a cake and a fond memory of him and Yellow getting into command blocks to prank the others. He talked about Blue’s cooking and how amazing it was. Chosen didn’t ask questions, but Red could tell he was listening.
He talked about Second and how they would all curl up in their nest and watch a movie, and how amazing their art skills were. It didn’t feel like a terrible idea to lightly bring up the subject of preening, so Red also talked about that. How they liked getting the spot just below the bend of their wings messed with and would practically turn into a liquid.
They made it to the house, and Red helped Chosen get settled inside. He politely thanked Red for his time and the place to stay and promptly hid in the bedroom that had been made for him.
It was a nice house. Lots of windows and light, and a spruce and stone palette had been picked out for it. It had been set up with a comfortable living room with some books, some furniture and a fireplace. There was a kitchen extending off of it, and a thin spiral staircase on the back wall that led to the upper floor where the bedroom was. Red hadn’t seen the bedroom, but he was sure it had been made well, like everything else in the house
It was a good start, Red thought, as he returned back to the PC for some well-earned rest.